#anyways i always waver between the question of whether she emotionally cheated or just cheated cheated

[rascheln]

i can both like nancy as a character and still feel very sad for steve and how their relationship went.

and man, sometimes it still fucks me up a little, thinking about how in hindsiight s1 is about steve falling in love with nancy, while she’s falling in love with jonathan. and then it ends with her deliberately choosing the boy that made it less of a hassle to be in a relationship.

maybe it’s because i know she didn’t choose steve out of malice or an active plan to hurt his feelings. it’s just that he was more convenient. in a way, it’s also tough to know that until they meet again after their fight, it isn’t quite clear that they’re fully broken up. yet she’s already slept with jonathan by the point where steve essentially tells her it’s okay to go be with the person she actually loves, because in a way she already did that.

if we go with the events of s2, it’s - nancy gets drunk at the halloween party and tells steve ‘like we’re in love’, revealing that just like she was keeping an outward appearance of being fine, she was just pretending to be in love with him - steve runs off (looking hurt/like he’s about to cry) and jonathan finds nancy and brings her home - nancy confronts steve at basketball practice. she’s angry at him for ditching her. he’s angry at her for being unable/unwilling to tell him that she loves him, essentially confirming what she said the night before. steve gets called back to practice and storms off. -> this is where one can interpret their relationship to be over except: - steve turns up at the wheelers’ house with a bouquet of roses, rehearsing an apology. so in his head, their relationship isn’t over. - at murray’s house, he aptly summarizes that jonathan has been too insecure to make a move on nancy and steve isn’t the guy she loves, but (as said above) he’s convenient. later that night, she sleeps with jonathan. - the next time steve and nancy meet, he doesn’t know this occurred. he does essentially end their relationship by calling himself a shitty boyfriend (maybe true for when he ditched her drunk ass at the party, doubtfully true for their entire relationship) and tells her it’s okay- basically letting her know she can move on...

yeah, so. s4 comes along and he doesn’t know. he assumed in s1 she’d cheated on him and absolutely went over the top shitty asshole, so maybe he didn’t want to assume again. maybe he trusted both nancy and jonathan that they weren’t actually gonna do anything so close after a fight with an ambiguous end. whatever it is that makes him not assume the worst this time around, it also makes him try to end their relationship amicably (when it’s clear nancy still has no idea what to say.)

like, i don’t think nancy should have told steve “by the way, i kinda have been in love with jonathan all this time and i kinda uhhh already slept with him.” but at the same time, that final interaction in s2 and then s4 makes it look like steve thought it was his fault they didn’t work out?? which... yeah, it kinda hits you how him trying to reconnect may look stupid when you know all that extra context to nancy’s feelings that he never found out about. because it would probably hurt way more to know how much his feelings genuinely weren’t ever requited, instead of just thinking there was something about how he acted that made nancy not fall in love/fall out of love.

and to be clear, this is not an “i hate nancy”-post and more a “the more i think about it, the more messed up it becomes”-post. i don’t think there would have been a clean solution for them- she kinda set herself up and got herself into this mess and turned steve into collateral in the process. and it’s only by sheer luck that no one who could tell steve about it (her, jonathan and murray) has any interest in letting him know.